Now the author, 64, has spoken of her experience of dating as an older woman, saying that no matter how “drooling, alcoholic, boring, self-obsessed” men are, they find a woman, adding: “And it doesn’t happen the other way round.”

Moggach says her younger self could not imagine women of 60 falling in love because they “looked so ancient”. Now, however, she experiences the same emotions as a teenager, wondering if “he” will call.

In next week’s Stella, Moggach speaks of the lessons she has drawn from her experience of being single later in life.

She is now in a relationship with Mark Williams, a writer, but says her experience of dating has meant dealing with the challenges of ageing.

“One man asked me out for a walk on Hampstead Heath but cancelled because one of his teeth had fallen out.”

Moggach found herself single in her mid-50s after the end of a seven-year relationship with Csaba Pasztor, a Hungarian artist 15 years her junior, which had followed the death in 1994 of her partner of 10 years Mel Calman, the cartoonist. She was previously divorced from Tony Moggach.

“The first thing I discovered was the chronic shortage of available men,” she writes. “Most of them were married, of course. And if not, they were chasing younger women. The bald fact is that a man in his sixties or seventies is far more likely to pull than a woman.”

Moggach says the phenomenon of dating among people in their sixties reflects how baby-boomers are “reinventing ageing as we enter it”.

However, she says of her new partner: “He doesn’t mind wrinkles, but then he’s got some himself.”